Collection: Working with Clients Affected by Narcissism

It is the age of selfies and the culture of “me”, the individual. Academics have found that the incidence of narcissistic personality traits rose as fast as obesity from the 1980s to the present. Studies have cited the 936 million daily users of Facebook in conjunction with other research linking use of Facebook with narcissistic behaviour and low self-esteem. Still other observers offer the recent sharp rise in cosmetic procedures and plastic surgery as evidence. In short, narcissism has been labelled the “modern epidemic”. The lifetime prevalence of narcissistic personality disorder has been estimated at 6.2 percent in the general population, 9.4 percent among people age 20 to 29, and up to 16 percent in the clinical populations, but those figures are likely to be low, as incidence of NPD has more than doubled in the United States in the last ten years. Yet what do we really know about the disorder: what causes it, what maintains it, and who is afflicted with it?

NPD is a disorder in which individuals seem to have an inflated sense of their own importance and an unrealistically deep need for admiration. A person with NPD is majorly preoccupied with issues of power, personal adequacy, prestige, and vanity. He or she lacks empathy and exudes a sense of superiority, but beneath the mask of super-confidence rests an extremely fragile self-esteem. Individuals with NPD are insensitive to others’ feelings, but crumple at the slightest hint of criticism to themselves. This collection offers a basic understanding of what narcissism is and its aetiology, how to work with it when clients or others are afflicted with it, and how it shows up in real people.